How to Use Digg to Bring Customers to Your Online Store

Digg can be a great way for you to boost exposure for your online store. I recently examined reddit and showed how to best leverage their community to drive traffic to your ecommerce store. Digg is quite similar to reddit - they're both full of obscure humor, inside jokes, and landmines everywhere waiting to detonate upon the first hint of self-promotion. Although traffic on Digg is declining, it still gets an estimated 4.6 million unique US visitors a month. If you're thinking about using Digg to drive traffic to your online store, here are some things to consider:

What is Digg?

Digg is a free social discovery service that aims to show you the most interesting news and online content on any given topic. Its users help surface great content by digging (or up voting) interesting articles that are then featured on the site's main page. They also aid in removing spam or inappropriate content from the front page by burying it.

How to Engage With Digg's Community

An important part of effectively promoting your business within an online community is to actively become a part of it. This means digging and burying stories that you're personally interested in and/or are related to your store's niche.

What's perhaps the most vital thing to do is to comment on stories submitted by others. Add value to conversations with insightful and interesting comments which spark further discussion about a story. This will raise your stock among Digg users and help you stand out as a trustworthy resource on the site for specific topics.

The Digg community doesn't like it when companies try to market to them. To avoid public shaming, don't include a direct link to your store in one of your comments unless it's absolutely relevant. Trying to promote your store by simply submitting links to your home page or individual products won't work. It's also poor form and really annoying to the users of Digg.

Be Awesome!

Whatever you do on Digg needs to be either funny, superbly interesting, or informative as hell. Instead of simply linking to an item you're selling, link to a blog post that explains how your products might be used in an interesting way. If the blog post is engaging, interesting or entertaining enough, it will start to gain traction on Digg and lead to increased traffic to your blog post. In turn, more visitors will browse your products and become customers. The more awesome your content - the more traffic you'll receive.

How to Advertise on Digg

If being awesome isn't for you, or if you don't have the time (fair enough) then Digg offers a variety of advertising packages to help you get your online store noticed. One of their most popular choices is where you can have your ad displayed as a news article among standard content on the site. Digg allows you to create your own ads by combining a headline, URL, thumbnail image and summary description. As with many other online ad platforms, you take part in an auction-based process which is based on the number of Diggs and cost-per-click bids. Advertising to targeted sections of the Digg community will ensure that your products are found by people who will potentially become your customers.